Most studios set their first prices by asking around. A friend mentions their day rate, or a competitor’s website lists three packages, and the next job closes at a number that sounded reasonable. Three weeks later nobody can say whether it made money.
A borrowed number has someone else’s costs and someone else’s clients built into it.
Pricing from your own numbers takes a few weeks of measuring the first time, and after that it’s a spreadsheet you update every few months.
In short
- Count every stage of a project, including revision rounds and project management, which is where most quotes leak.
- Log hours by stage on three to five projects and use the median for each stage.
- Divide a normal month’s costs by the hours you can sell, then divide by 0.75 to keep 25% of the price.
- Price extra rounds and rush work from your own data, and put both in the proposal.
What a video project actually uses up
Ask an editor how long a two-minute brand video takes and you’ll hear about the edit. It’s usually the biggest block, but a quote that only counts the edit misses most of what goes wrong. A typical project goes through:
- pre-production, with the briefing call, script or treatment, locations, casting and the shoot plan
- the shoot day, from load-in until the gear is back at the studio
- the edit, up to the first cut the client sees
- every revision round after that
- finishing, with color, the sound mix, graphics, captions and an export for each format
- project management, meaning emails, calls about notes, scheduling, uploads and chasing the approval
That last item is where most quotes leak. Nobody opens a timesheet for a 20-minute call about the size of the logo, but a dozen of those calls add up to half a working day.
Revision rounds come next. The quote sets aside one evening for “small tweaks”, and the notes arrive in three batches.
Measure a few projects by stage
Take the next three to five projects that look like the work you want to sell, and log hours against each stage as you go, calls and uploads included. Keep revision rounds separate from the first edit, since that number tells you how many rounds a fixed price can include.
When those projects close, take the median for each stage instead of the one that went smoothly, and compare the totals with what you quoted. If the edit landed on the estimate and project management ran far over, you know which line of the next quote to fix.
Turn hours into a cost per hour
Add up a normal month: salaries, your own pay (use a real figure even if you pay yourself irregularly), freelancers on a monthly arrangement, rent, software, insurance, accounting, and the gear you’ll eventually replace, spread over the months it lasts.
Divide that by the hours you can sell, which is fewer than the hours you pay for. An editor paid for 160 hours a month also sits in internal meetings, runs backups, helps with pitches and waits out the quiet days between jobs. The owner loses even more to sales and admin.
The share of paid hours that goes to client work is called utilization, and it’s easy to guess yours too high. Check it against the projects you measured: hours logged on client work in a month, divided by the hours paid that month.
For example, a studio of three people, the owner and two editors, costs $21,600 a month, with $16,000 in pay and $5,600 in fixed costs. They’re paid for 480 hours (3 × 160), and in the month they measured, 288 of those went to client work, a utilization of 60%.
Each hour they can sell costs them $21,600 ÷ 288 = $75. Charging $60 because the hours “are paid for anyway” loses $15 on every hour sold.
Then add margin, the share of the price you keep as profit. It isn’t the same thing as markup. To keep 25% of the price, divide the cost by 0.75: $75 ÷ 0.75 = $100 an hour.
Adding 25% on top of $75 gives $93.75, which leaves $18.75, only 20% of the price.
Margin is what carries you through a slow month or a client who pays 60 days late. Every price you quote gets built from that $100.
Choose how to package the price
All four models below use the same internal rate. They differ in who carries the risk when a job runs long.
Hourly billing suits open-ended work, like digging through an archive for a client who can’t define the scope yet. The risk sits with the client, and few clients like watching a meter run.
It also pays you less as you get faster. If you bill hourly, agree on a cap.
A fixed price per project, with a set number of revision rounds, is the usual choice when the deliverable is clear. The client knows the total up front and the risk of a slow edit moves to you, which is why the measured hours matter. Write down the length, the formats, how many rounds and what counts as a round.
A day rate is the natural unit for a shoot. Say how many hours make a day and what happens after that, and put gear and travel on separate lines.
A monthly retainer fits recurring work, such as a batch of social cuts every month. Give it a limit on volume and rounds and a rule for unused work, or the volume creeps up while the fee stays put.
Extra rounds and rush jobs
Price an extra round from your own data. If a round takes your team about four hours, an extra one at $100 an hour is $400, and that number goes in the proposal before the project starts.
A new script or new footage is a change of scope, which gets a new estimate instead of counting as a round. Our post on how to stop endless revision rounds covers keeping the count down in the first place.
Rush work has a real cost, in overtime or in another client’s job that gets pushed back. Charge a surcharge on the hours it affects and list it in the proposal too.
A worked example
Here’s how the studio above might quote a two-minute brand video with one shoot day and two rounds included, using the median of three similar projects they measured. All figures are an example, in US dollars.
| Stage | Hours |
|---|---|
| Pre-production: brief, script, shoot plan | 10 |
| Shoot day: 2 people × 10 hours | 20 |
| Edit to first cut | 16 |
| Two revision rounds | 8 |
| Color, mix and exports | 6 |
| Project management and client calls | 6 |
| Total | 66 |
At $100 an hour, 66 hours come to $6,600. Gear rental and a freelance sound recordist add $900 at cost, so the quote is $7,500.
A third round would be $400, and a rush delivery, at 30% on the 30 post-production hours (edit, rounds and finishing), adds $900.
If the client only wants the shoot, the day rate for the two-person crew is $2,000 plus gear. Four social cuts a month, at six hours each plus four hours of calls, come to 28 hours, a $2,800 retainer.
How RecReview helps you measure it
RecReview doesn’t store rates or send invoices, so the rate and the quote stay in your spreadsheet. It gives you the hours to put in it.
Every task card, on the kanban or in the video grid, and every row of the table view has a timer that starts with one click. Each person runs one timer at a time, so starting the timer on another task closes the previous one.
Cards show the hours already logged, and on the review page the running timer stays at the top of the screen with a stop button.
Each session records the task’s phase, such as pre-production, production or post-production. The task details show the total, the hours per person and the estimate with how much of it is used. When you set an estimate, RecReview suggests one from the median hours logged on other tasks in the same project.
Owners and admins also get Metrics, where a chart groups hours by client, project, phase or person, by day, week or month. Another view shows the average hours per video, the post-production hours per video and actual hours against the estimates.
Those are the numbers this post asks you to collect, taken from the timer instead of an end-of-month timesheet. The time tracking and analytics pages have more.
